This reading refreshes some of my understandings of the Net art, and it is quite interesting to learn the historical development of this current trend.
To me, I have always associated the Web with the concept of “new media”, and considered web art as something of current times. I failed to realize that the era of “contemporary” or “modern” has actually started quite early, and there are many concepts related to the social context of the past. Web art is not only about new digital technology or cool interactive effects, but also has something to do with revealing influential social ideas or phenomena of a certain period of time. As Rachel Greene introduced in the first paragraph, Net.art was artists, enthusiasts, and technoculture critics trading ideas, sustaining one another’s interest through ongoing dialogue” (162). In this sense, the “artists” that participated in the Net.art broke the strict category of fine artists, and, with the use of the new media — the web, expressed their thoughts and ideas in a more performative but still quite abstract way. Since many of the initial intentions of the earliest net arts were related to social activism or anonymity, they were not designed specifically for artistic expression. Greene stated that “the term ‘NET.ART’ is less a coinage than an accident. This implies that it was not started as an artistic behavior, but rather, the artistic value was spotted and attached to it later.
The net arts are in a way a tool for social campaigns. As mentioned by Greene, some heated topics such as feminism are widely spread on the web. However, the virtual community created online do not reflect the actual reality and tend more to go to an extreme. As the interpersonal relationship is shallower, and there is usually a gap between one’s true identity in real life and his identity online, prevailing words and comments on the web only represent some certain groups of people. Greene also states that, despite many female artists who seem to gain their voices and recognition on the web, the topic of feminism only appeals to a few in reality.
It is also interesting to notice that, with the communicative feature of the web, web arts are naturally used in some promotional events or advertising activities, arousing the sense of community. As the Internet creates a virtual public space where users create and decide for its contents, the net arts cannot popularize without being understood and spread by the users. They are usually interactive, contradictive, and playful. However, the better viewability and perceptibility of net art pieces do not necessarily lead to the reduction of their conceptual meaning, which actually contradicts my previous beliefs. Many of the net art pieces are academic and specialized, not easy to fully comprehend.
Finally, reflecting back to what we’ve read about McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”, I believe that the web, or more generally, digital technology, is a form of new media, which brings challenges as well as new possibilities to artists in current society. For us to better understand net art pieces, it is also essential to understand what message the medium web implies and how the cyber culture influence these art works.